John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland, he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing President Lincoln, he lamented the then-recent abolition of slavery in the United States.Originally, Booth and his small group of conspirators had plotted to kidnap Lincoln to aid the Confederate cause. They later decided to murder him, as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Although the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, had surrendered to the Union Army four days earlier, Booth believed that the Civil War remained unresolved because the Army of Tennessee of General Joseph E. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of John Wilkes Booth has received more than 9,761,502 page views. His biography is available in 53 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 50 in 2019). John Wilkes Booth is the 2nd most popular extremist (up from 3rd in 2019), the 47th most popular biography from United States (down from 46th in 2019) and the most popular American Extremist.

John Wilkes Booth was most famous for assassinating Abraham Lincoln.